In 1957 a Harvard alumni group asked this writer to initiate a study of leftist infiltration at Harvard University. Previous efforts to find a qualified Harvard alumnus for the task had proved unfruitful.

This was a period when America was still in shock over scandals involving traitorous government officials in the service of the Stalinist terror apparatus. Disloyal Ivy leaguers had used the wealth and resources of the United States to undermine their own country. Incredibly, at the same time, they were able to betray over 600 million people into communist hands in countries laid prostrate by World War II. The names of the accused included Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, John Abt, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. All were Harvard trained and some had been Faculty members.

Even a cursory glance at leftism in Harvard indicated that just to chronicle all socialistic penetrations would require a large staff and years of investigation. It soon became obvious that non-leftist members of the Harvard faculty feared that sanctions would be imposed by the University administration against those who cooperated with anti-communists. Under the covering slogan of “academic freedom” the leftist host at Harvard evolved a complex of sponge-like barriers to smother attacks and then quietly to quarantine crusaders for individual liberty. Those brave enough to challenge the leftists faced the penalty of being isolated and then gerrymandered out of influential positions. Crafty strategems were devised slowly to nudge resisters out of university life. As one faculty member sardonically put it, “they used to ease you out—now they ooze you out.”

The direction of our study was set by a Harvard trained economist, the late Professor Olin Glenn Saxon, who spent many years teaching at Yale University. For years he kept warning the American public that economic teachings promulgated as “Keynesianism” in universities were a focal point of infection spreading the leftist virus into the blood stream of the entire nation.

Possessing the advantage of a twenty-five year background in leftist studies, and with Professor Saxon’s constant cooperation, I spent two years assembling proof of an interlarded melange that forms the socialistic underworld. Carefully checked evidence disclosed an operating pattern hatched in socialist nerve centers which was then directed into colleges, government bureaus and publishing outlets. Over a period of years this seeding process pervasively indoctrinated the general news media. This confluence of socializing currents shaped most of the debilitating social convulsions of our time. Bedrock evidence proved Professor Saxon’s thesis to be correct. What was particularly shocking was the depth of the infiltration by the Keynesian-Fabian intriguers. This massive overlapping of deceit and duplicity was carefully shielded by a spurious defense mechanism bearing the label of “academic freedom.”

The first edition of Keynes at Harvard actually represented many years of intensive probing. Over fifty former communist and socialist leaders were consulted. More than 100,000 published and written items were read. Such accumulated evidence gained from investigating, studying and writing on left-wing matters was necessary to identify the serpentine paths within the collectivist maze. Over-simplified monomanias and “one enemy” solutions were found to be misleadingly harmful. Most such short cut panaceas suffer from a built-in police state collectivism. Such movements could also be included in the aphorism, “scratch a Liberal and find a Fascist.”

Intellectual booby-traps and deceptive masks to fool the unwary are standard equipment in the leftist arsenal. In spite of skillful concealment, time and again careful analysis uncovered past communist and socialist activists under the Keynesian label. Keynes at Harvard is actually an introduction to the over-all Fabian socialist process. It is our hope to stimulate others to pursue this cabal in all of its many interlocking manifestations.

Great credit is due to Sister M. Margaret Patricia McCarran for her monumental studies on Fabian socialist permeations in Britain and the United States. Organized attempts to hinder her work by leftists within Catholic circles is a disgraceful example of Fabian leftist pressures to keep vital information from reaching the public. Sister McCarran is a true pioneer in exposing the hidden hand of Fabianism.

There is not space enough to record the vast contribution of Mr. Archibald B. Roosevelt to Keynes at Harvard. He modestly refers to himself as the “wheel-horse” of the project. Actually, he was the general overseer. Mr. Roosevelt gave generously of his profound knowledge of history and of his expertise in American political processes. He organized the “begging campaigns” to raise money to finance the study. While left-liberals secure enormous sums from wealthy patrons and foundations, we have always been restricted to an austerity budget. Mr. Roosevelt scrutinized every line of the original work.

We owe a particular debt of gratitude to Arthur Brooks Harlow who volunteered to serve as a one-man public relations task force. He aided tremendously in boosting the sales of the book to 150,000 copies in the face of an almost complete blackout of the major book reviewing media.

Printer’s page proofs were sent to forty people in business, labor, government and education. Many sent useful suggestions that were incorporated in the final proofs. We are particularly grateful to the late Sterling Morton, who as patron of certain economist groups was particularly crtitcal in appraising many so-called free enterprise economists. He observed that most of them suffered mental paralysis when asked to pierce the Keynesian-leftist smoke-screen. Like Professor Saxon, Mr. Morton felt that only those not imprisoned in academic cocoons could unravel the motives and techniques of Keynesian economics.

We note that John Kenneth Galbraith, the leftist economist at Harvard, was especially aroused by the statement in this book that, “Harvard was the launching pad for the Keynesian rocket in America.” Galbraith, and his menage in the economics department, should know that this phrase was entirely Professor Saxon’s, along with the observation that the late Professor Sumner Slichter was the real architect of the policy of planned creeping inflation.

Mention must be made of the great pioneer efforts by the late John T. Flynn in exposing Fabian socialism in America through his great books The Road Ahead to Socialism and The Decline of the American Republic.*

Max Eastman in his amazing book, Reflections On the Failure of Socialism, dramatically summed up fifty years of experience with left-wing movements.† We could all benefit by his cogent advice at the very beginning of his book when he stated, “Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once-firm resistance to tyranny.”

* John T. Flynn, The Road Ahead to Socialism, Devin-Adair, New York, 1949. The Decline of the American Republic, Devin-Adair, New York, 1955.